UPDATED - Developers Race To Buy First Firefox OS Phones

People look at a screen displaying a ZTE mobile phone with a Firefox logo on its screen during a press conference to present the new Firefox OS mobile operating system in Barcelona on February 24, 2013, a day before the start of the 2013 Mobile World Congress. The 2013 Mobile World Congress, the world's biggest mobile fair, is held from February 25 to February 28 in Barcelona. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

UPDATE: Geeksphone sold approximately 1,000 developer-targeted smartphones running Firefox OS, and said it had shipped all of them as of 3pm Pacific time on Tuesday. It will make more available on its online shop on Wednesday morning Madrid time. More numbers and details now up in a separate post here.

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There's been plenty of skepticism over the future of web-based smartphones, but software developers still want to try their hand at the big alternative to closed ecosystems from
Apple,
Google and
Microsoft.

Last night Geeksphone, a Spanish smartphone manufacture, ran out of devices running the first iteration of the new mobile software platform Firefox OS, coded by Mozilla, within a few hours of going live.

The two available phones, Keon and Peak, cost $119 and $194 respectively, and are aimed at developers who want to test their applications on Firefox OS. This is an early, 1.0 version of the platform so not yet at a stage that Mozilla wants for the general public.

The non-profit organization is targeting first-time smartphone buyers in emerging markets with Firefox OS and has partnered with mass-market OEMs like Huawei,
LG Electronics and
Sony to start releasing Firefox phones to the mainstream later this year.

Mozilla argues that while iPhones and Android phones have become enormously popular, consumers should be able to circumvent their respective app stores to access online content. The idea is that a web-based phone coded in HTML5 standards will make the Internet more accessible to mobile users, and will also be cheaper to buy.

Geeksphone did not made clear how many Firefox phones it has actually sold since last night, but according to TheNextWeb the company can "theoretically manufacture up to roughly 5,000 devices per day."

Geeksphone is a small, Madrid-based firm run by 20-year-old Javier Aguera. He started the company when he was 16, and initially focused on manufacturing smartphones for Google's Android operating system, then pivoted his phones last year to run Firefox's web-based operating system. The company has 20 employees who are mostly engineers, and outsources the final assembly of its devices to a company in central China.

Aguera told TheNextWeb in a recent interview that he was compelled by the strong developer community that Mozilla had cultivated around Firefox (best known as a desktop browser), and the industry support it attained from industry leaders like Qualcomm and LG. At least 18 carriers have also pledged to distribute Firefox phones when the first mainstream devices are assembled, the biggest supporter among them being Telefonica.

While Mozilla had put more than 500 engineers on the Firefox OS project for the last two years, Telefonica has tasked "dozens" of engineers to also write services for Firefox. The Spanish carrier also told Forbes earlier this year that it had has set aside a marketing budget in the double-digit millions of euros to promote Firefox phones in Latin America and Europe in 2013.